Loving Life ...: Backyard Overhaul!

Let me start off by saying that Tab has been doing A-L-O-T of work in our backyard trying to clean up some of the trees that fell during the latest round of storms and cleaning out all of the over grown areas towards the back of the yard. And as a result of all of his hard work we had a huge pile of debris in the middle of the backyard that needed to either be removed or burned.

So now lets fast forward to yesterday (Monday) ...

Ryland had been coming down with something for the past few days and has had a low grade fever all weekend with a running nose and cough. Yesterday morning he woke up with an even worse running nose, gunk in the eyes, coughing and still having a fever. So we decided to keep him out of school and my dad came out to help watch him. While Ryland was taking a nap my dad decided to walk up to talk to the guys that were working at our neighbor's house (with a Bobcat) to see if they would be willing to take away of the pile of stuff in our backyard. The discussion then turned into "what about not only removing the pile of stuff but completely clearing the rest of our backyard and grading the area". They were able to give us a good quote so they decided to go ahead with having them do everything. I had no idea that this was going on so when I got home from work I was S-U-R-P-R-I-S-E-D to see mud tracks leading to our driveway and then really surprised to see that they went through our fence and into our backyard. At first I thought that our fence had been busted and these workers had the wrong house!

I will post some pictures of the chaos and mess soon. They are doing a great job. And our backyard looks really good. Now we just need to decide what we are going to do with all of the new open and cleared area!

Now back to Ryland ...

His temp spiked to 104.2 late yesterday afternoon. Dr Loventhal recommended that we take him to an after hour pediatrician since we did not have time to get him into to see him before they closed for the day. So Tab and I headed to the after hours pediatrician's office as soon as I got home. The good news is that he does not have an ear infection or anything congestion in his chest, etc. The bad news is that they could not determine what was causing all of his symptoms. As we were putting him down to bed last night he was rolling around playing like he normally does but then he hit his nose in the wrong spot and it started bleeding. He did not cry so I do not think that it hurt but it took a little bit for it to stop bleeding. He had a decent night's sleep last night but woke up with bloody boogers all over him (yum!) and still had a fever. So we kept him out of school again today and both Tab and I are working from home to watch him. I hope he can fight through this "funk" fast and start feeling better soon. I think he misses all of his friends at school and being able to run around and feel 100%.